COLONISING THE RED PLANET: HUMANS TO MARS IN OUR TIME

摘要

Many people believe that a human mission to Mars is a venture for the far future, a task for 'the next generation'. Such a point of view has no basis in fact. On the contrary, the US has in hand, today, all the technologies required for undertaking an aggressive, continuing programme of human Mars exploration, with the first piloted mission reaching the Red Planet within a decade. We do not need to build giant spaceships embodying futuristic propulsion technologies in order to go to Mars. We do not need to build a lunar base, a grander space station, or seek any other way to mark time for further decades. We can reach the Red Planet with relatively small spacecraft launched directly to Mars by boosters embodying comparable technology as that which carried astronauts to the Moon almost a half century ago. The key to success comes from following a 'travel light and live off the land' strategy that has well served explorers over the centuries that humanity has wandered and searched the globe. A plan that approaches human missions to the Red Planet in this way is known as the Mars Direct approach.1 Here is how it would work.